


The Winter of War

by butforthegrace



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-09
Updated: 2011-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-22 10:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butforthegrace/pseuds/butforthegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavender Alina Brown is nothing like her mother.</p><p> </p><p>(Personal canon for Lavender Brown.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winter of War

Lavender Alina Brown looks nothing like her mother.

 

Lavender has never lived through the winter of war. She is a spring child—fresh, innocent. Not a child of battle, not war-hardened. There is still pink in her cheeks and a smile ready at her lips.

Lavender's mother teaches her songs of war, the products of old and raw magic. “I sang them as I cursed dark wizards,” Lyudmila tells her daughter in an accent that has not thinned since she moved to England, two years before Lavender's birth. Lavender was brought up with the names of her father's land, but the language of her mother's, and the stories. To be sure, she knows Babbity Rabbity and the Cackling Stump and all of its ilk, but only thanks to her grandmother; her mother told her tales of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Beautiful, Koschey the Deathless and the Firebird. She grows up speaking Russian to her mother and English to her father. She grows up different from the other magical children around her, strange because she has a slight accent when she talks (which she is embarrassed of when she learns how, and works to get rid of it; but it never quite leaves, giving a strange taste to some of her words). When they compare their parents' magic, Lavender recites spells in a language no one else understands.

She supposes she understands it, because she looks almost nothing like the woman who was once Lyudmila Zaytseva. She doesn't take after her mother, partly because Lyudmila is quiet and constantly wary; she bears the scars of war, and Lavender, who has grown up in peacetime, doesn't want to think about fighting. She is giggly so that she can fill her quiet house with noise. She doesn't want to be like her mother, who warned her once, “War isn't over, Lavender. War never dies. It only sleeps. It will wake up soon, and what will you do then, with your songs of spring?”

 

But when war comes to Lavender, she sings. She hums a battle song her mother taught her under her breath as she runs through the halls of Hogwarts, wand at the ready. She is perhaps more her mother's daughter than she had ever believed. People turn to her in confusion when they hear her shouting out spells they don't recognize; no one had known before, except Parvati, of what her mother taught her when she was growing up.

She is, perhaps, more like her mother than she had thought. When war comes to Lavender, she forgets the Latin Hogwarts has taught her. She reaches for her roots. Her spells have always worked better in her native language anyway.

 

When Fenrir Greyback comes to her, she is singing.


End file.
